A Travail Beyond the Veil

We all learn to say goodbye in our own unique ways.

Robbie Jensen was ten years old the first time he put on a suit. It was a black two-piece that his mother bought off the clearance rack at Men’s Wearhouse, and had paired with a crisp white dress shirt and black tie from the display tables near the register.

While they were in the store, Robbie’s mom had muttered something about not wanting to spend a lot of money on something that he was going to wear once and then grow out of, and that she promised to buy him a nicer suit when he was older. Robbie didn’t really understand that, because the cheap suit was already the nicest thing he had ever worn in his life, but he knew better than to ask her for clarification. His mom wasn’t in a question-answering mood lately.

Robbie’s mom looked at her little boy in the dressing room mirror. His disheveled blonde hair stuck out over the collar of his dress shirt, and she made a mental note to add a haircut to her neverending list of to-do items over the next week. She thought about all the other parents who at this very moment were also buying their kids suits for family weddings, fundraisers, or award banquets. She wondered how many others were buying suits for kids that were about to bury their father.

She choked off a sob and tried to pass it off as a cough. She refused to let outward appearances slip, even if her inner monologue was screaming at her:

He’s too young to be attending a funeral!

Everybody knew that, but the universe rarely solicits our input when scheduling tragedy.

She had to get out of here. There were too many other things on the list of preparations that needed to be made before she had to bury her husband, and if Robbie wore that suit for one minute longer, she might lose it completely. She told him to hurry up and get dressed, told the tailor she’d take it, and hurried to the register to pay for it while Robbie finished changing back into his jeans and t-shirt.


The next time Robbie put on that suit was the day of the funeral. The whole experience was a bit of a blur, and he wasn’t sure he understood half of what was happening. They went to church even though they never went to church. Then they went to the cemetery, a place that Robbie had never been to before. It seemed peaceful, with a lot of trees and an open grassy area with rocks spread out in neat rows. He risked asking a question of his mother, and she explained to him that they were headstones to mark the graves of the people who were buried there, so loved ones could come visit. Some people liked to bring flowers, or to sit and talk to the people who were buried there.

The funeral itself was pretty boring to Robbie. He sat there and listened to their pastor talk about Heaven and quote some verses from the Bible, and then a whole bunch of people that he didn’t know lined up and gave him and his mom hugs, or a pat on the shoulder, or just a really sad look and told them to reach out if they ever needed anything. His dad’s casket was lowered into the ground and his mom said someone would come along later to fill in the grave after they had all left for the wake.

He kept thinking about that. While people milled around his house, snacking on the potluck items that friends and neighbors and coworkers brought, Robbie’s thoughts returned to the idea that there was probably some guy shoveling that big pile of dirt onto his dad’s casket right now.

When he looked around and realized that nobody was paying attention to him, he asked his mom if he could go upstairs and take a nap. She agreed, but instead of going upstairs, Robbie headed out to the garage where he wheeled his bike out the side door and onto the driveway. The cemetery was only two miles from their house; he could be there in about ten minutes if he pushed himself.


Robbie arrived at the cemetery just as the groundskeepers were starting to shovel dirt into the grave.

“You’re not allowed to ride around in here, kid!” One of them called out as he approached. “Go ride your bike somewhere else!”

The other clocked Robbie’s disheveled suit and nudged the other one.

“I think it’s this stiff’s kid,” he muttered under his breath to his colleague before speaking loudly for Robbie’s benefit. “This your dad?”

Robbie nodded.

The groundskeeper nodded back at him in silent understanding.

“We’re gonna go take our lunch break. Just... make sure you’re not here when we get back, huh?”

Robbie nodded, the two groundskeepers getting into an old golf cart and zipping off as he approached his father’s grave. Looking down, he noted that the hole had been filled in just about up to the lid of the coffin, and the first few shovelfuls of dirt had landed on its lacquered lid.

He sat there for a long time, not saying anything. Just listening.


When the groundskeepers returned to the gravesite, Robbie was gone. They congratulated themselves on a good deed done and returned to their pile of dirt to finish the job. But as they each loaded up a shovelful and turned toward the open grave, they stopped short and peered down into the hole.

The casket lid was open. The body inside was gone.

“Do you think he...”

“How? Did you see how scrawny that kid was? No way he lifted the body all by himself.”

As they looked around for any sign of the kid — and the body they were supposed to be burying! — they noticed that several of the other graves had been disturbed. A wide swath of them from this point all the way back in the direction the kid came from had been freshly overturned, the green grass chewed up and mounds of fresh, dark grave dirt in their place.

The groundskeepers looked at one another.

What the hell?


Arriving back home just as his mom was seeing off the last guests from the wake, Robbie rounded the corner to their cul-de-sac on his bike. She gave him a confused look, surely trying to reconcile this new information with the belief that he was in his room taking a nap. As Robbie approached, he watched her face — and those of the remaining guests — change from confusion to perplexity to horror as Robbie’s entourage emerged around the corner.

Robbie’s father, having been dead the least amount of time, still looked to be in relatively good condition, except for the erratic, spasmodic movements that came from something not entirely in control of its corporeal form. The revenants behind him, however, were in various states of decay, from those that were just starting to have their skin rot to those who were more decomposed than whole at this point. All of them shambled down the idyllic suburban street, a parade of decay and undeath.

The guests screamed as they rushed into their car and drove off, giving the zombies a wide berth. Robbie’s mom looked from her son to her husband and back again. Gazing at her dead-now-reanimated husband, at a face she didn’t imagine she’d ever be able to look upon again, the brave facade she had been putting on for weeks finally crumbled. She fell to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably with a mix of relief, disbelief, and more than a little hysteria.

“Mom, are you okay?” Robbie asked, ditching his bike as he neared and moving to embrace her.

“I don’t understand...”

“I wanted to visit dad one more time,” Robbie said. “You said that people sometimes like to go to a loved one’s grave and bring flowers and talk to them. But I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just sat and listened. Mom, I heard him. Dad told me that he didn’t want to be dead.”

Robbie’s mom looked up at her son, tears streaming down her face.

“You ... spoke to the dead?”

“They spoke to me first.”

She looked at the assembled crowd of zombies standing behind her husband.

“And them?”

Robbie looked to the desiccated mob behind his father and shrugged.

“A lot of people don’t want to be dead.”

“But... how?”

Robbie looked at her confused, as if he didn’t understand the question. As if raising people from the dead was just something that everybody knew how to do. When he saw her genuine lack of understanding, he just shrugged his shoulders again.

“I dunno... I was sitting there and just listening and then I heard them. So many of them were telling me about their regrets. Things they wished they could have had the chance to do. People they wish they could see again. So I asked if they wanted to stay in the ground or if they wanted to get up and get a chance to do those things again. These are the ones that wanted to, so I just... let them.”

Robbie looked past his father to the other zombies, who stood there like statues swaying slightly in the breeze.

“You don’t have to keep following me,” Robbie told them. “You can go and do whatever you need to do. You’re free.”

Robbie and his mom watched as the group disbanded, each shuffling off in a different direction, presumably toward whatever unfinished business awaited them. After a few minutes, it was just Robbie, his mom, and his father’s reanimated corpse standing over them. Robbie helped his mother to her feet and she looked at her husband. It was undeniably him but it also wasn’t; whatever it was that stood before them stared off into the distance and didn’t seem to register his family standing before him.

“Is he... conscious?” Robbie’s mom asked, hope creeping into her voice.

“Sort of,” Robbie said. “I think he can hear and understand us, but he hasn’t said anything yet. And I haven’t been able to hear him since he woke up again. But he does what I say.”

Robbie’s mom reached a shaking, tentative hand out and lightly caressed the cheek of her husband. The body didn’t respond; it just kept staring.

“Are you in there, my love?” she implored.

The body didn’t respond; it just kept staring.

“Go ahead,” Robbie told his father.

The cadaver mechanically raised its own hand and placed it over the top of his wife’s, which was still lingering on his cheek. And then the body just kept staring.

All of the hope that Robbie’s mom had allowed to build over the past few minutes immediately drained from her body again, leaving a husk of devastation behind.

“I don’t understand,” Robbie said, watching her grief play out. “I got dad back. We can be together again. Our family doesn’t have to be broken anymore.”

“Oh Robbie,” his mom said. “It doesn’t work like that, honey. Being able to see your dad again was an incredible... gift. But the things I miss most about your dad are things that I don’t think can come back. And that’s okay. I know we’re both really sad right now, but we’ll always have our memories of him and that’s how we can help him live on even after his physical body has become something else.”

“I miss him, mom.”

“I know, honey. But this isn’t the way to fix it. Not for us, or for any of the others that you brought with you.”

Robbie thought that over for a long time, then reluctantly nodded.

“Can you... get them back to where they belong?” His mom asked.

“Yeah,” Robbie said, sniffling.

“Then let’s do that,” she replied. “Let’s put them to rest. And next time, we’ll go visit him at the cemetery rather than having you bring him here.”


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2,000 words

Written for: "The Distorted Minds Contest" 

Prompt: "They spoke to me first."